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Friday, 1 August 2014

Teasers from 4 short stories.

You sit down on your favorite chair. The computer screen is
blank. A story idea takes shape in your mind. You stare at the blinking cursor,
wondering how to start. From somewhere deep in your psyche, the words begin to
form. A few hours pass, maybe a few days, maybe several months, possibly a
couple of years but you stumble along, make some corrections and eventually you
reach the end. What a feeling when you tap the final letter, followed by the
final period and the story is finished. You have created something. Polish it
up with the help of knowledgeable people then give it to your readers in one
form or another. Some will like it, others won’t, many will never read it and
that’s okay. This is the wonder of writing.

I wanted to create a gift for my grandchildren, something
that would be a part of me, something they could keep for a lifetime if they
chose to. I decided on a series of short stories aptly entitled SHORTS. Volume
1 is for my oldest grandson, Matthieu. Following is a small taste of each story
selected for my gift to him.

SHORTS Vol.1

*The first story, The Ship Breakers, was conceived while I was researching information
on the ship breaking yards of Bangladesh for my novel Dark Side of a Promise.
What I discovered was at times unbelievable, heart breaking. The hardest and
most unsafe work I could possibly imagine is accomplished for very low wages
and yet, there is always people needing the work.

The story is about a fictitious tanker taking its final
voyage and an imaginary family that might need the job of taking it apart.

The Neptune Giant is a VLCC, a very large crude carrier. When it was completed in 1979, it
ranked among the largest oil tankers in the world. From bow to stern, 75
Cadillacs could park bumper to bumper. The crews used bicycles to travel the
elongated deck. With a beam of nearly two hundred feet, five bungalows could be
placed lengthwise side by side across the deck; her keel is six stories
underwater. The raw steel is covered with over fifteen hundred gallons of
paint. She’d been given a lifespan of thirty years; instead, she had sailed
every ocean of the world, berthed at every continent, rode many storm’s fierce
waves and trolled the endless seas for thirty-five years. Today is her final
voyage.

Her last port
of call, two weeks ago, was Saint John, New Brunswick, with two million barrels
of Venezuelan crude. Now, the tanker cruises the Bay of Bengal at fourteen
knots. At that speed she requires five miles to come to a dead stop. The ship
breaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh, are only four miles away. The captain
brings the ship to starboard, aiming the aging tanker directly at the muddy
beach. The tide is high, which is necessary to allow the gargantuan machine to
ground itself like an aged sea lion, as near to the shore as possible, where it
will die.

The engine
that powers the ship is eighty-nine feet long and forty-four feet wide with
twelve massive cylinders – one of the largest engines in the world. It weighs
two thousand metric tons costing more than the rest of the transport. Its
thirst for fuel demands over fifteen hundred gallons of crude every hour. Its
last chore will be to power the vessel onto the tidal mud banks, where humans
who are dwarfed by its immensity will eventually take it apart, by hand, piece
by piece. The work is extremely dangerous, with an exceptionally high mortality
rate, and yet there is no shortage of men.

*The second story, Lloyd and the Baby, is about a man into his senior years
finding an abandoned baby. One of my first short stories is called The Four
Boxes of Memories and is about a man entering a nursing home and having to discard
many of his belongings. He had acquired four boxes of mementoes or memories of
his life. From that story I wanted to highlight one of the most important
memories of his life and how it all began.

Lloyd Minister was fifty-five years
old when he found a baby.For a man that
had never been married, had never fathered a child, it was a traumatic event to
say the least. Loneliness and confusion manifested by tiny wails and sobs,
reverberated through the rooms where he discovered the abandoned child. When he
entered the house, the whimpers he heard at first, feeble and uncertain,
suggested that someone had left a pet behind. He had sworn out loud at their
unkindness, scaring the tiny stranger above. It was then that he realized there
was an infant upstairs.

There had been only a tincture of
moonlight that night. Diffuse clouds bustled in the sky, dimming out the stars.
Unable to sleep, Lloyd went to his back deck for fresh air.A slight breeze had carried the aroma of
fields freshly mown, spiced with the dampness of the morn. It all seemed so
familiar. His respite was disturbed by the moving shadow of a darkened truck
pulling out of the driveway of his parents’ old farmhouse. The teenaged couple
that were renting it were leaving in the night, stealing four months’ rent as
well as some of Lloyd’s furniture. He guessed what was going on. He was
crestfallen that the young people were abusing his trust. It hurt even more
when a quarter mile down the road the vehicle’s taillights suddenly appeared.

He was chastising himself for being so naive when an eerie panic seized
him; goose bumps prickled his tightened skin. He was immediately concerned that
something was wrong at the house. He hurried back inside, grabbed his
flashlight, and rushed across the field to find out what was wrong. All he wore
on his feet were old thick wool socks he used for slippers. The sharp edges
that carpeted the field once the hay had been cut jabbed at his feet and broke
the callused skin in spots. He never slowed from the pain. His objective then
was urgency.

*The third story, The Shattered Figurine, was conceived when I was thinking
of what would a detective do if they discovered that the perpetrator of a
heinous crime was someone they knew, someone they knew intimately.

Josephine Naylor, shoulders sagged,
stares down at the frozen corpse. Even though rime disguises the otherwise
naked body, the Detective knows it is the missing teenager. The remains are
female, about five feet, maybe a hundred pounds without the frost. And the body
had been left in the same position as the other victims, all three, face up,
ankles and hands neatly tucked together bound with duct tape. The same parts
are missing.

This regrettable murder left no doubt
that the killer was the same person, based on the method of execution;
forensics had confirmed that with the second body. A third cadaver had brought
forth the criminal psychologists to graph out a profile that would tell what
“type” of individual might commit such a crime. The scene before her is,
therefore, extremely important, so she stands well enough away. She is still
able to discern an unusual shape upon the victim’s forehead, which, once
uncovered from its icy envelope, will likely prove to be a piece of broken
crystal similar to those found on the pale dead skin of the other three bodies,
in the same position.

Jo is standing at the edge of a wide
field shadowed by alders and tall spruces that front the extended forest behind
her. The rising sun is just cresting the pointed tops. The body is lying
parallel to the tree line at the rim of the pasture. It’s early December. The
night fog turned solid as the temperature dropped below freezing, cloaking
everything in stark white. Jo is startled from her contemplation by the
sensation that someone is watching her. She turns toward the open field,
scanning the perimeter of the woods. Nothing moves; not even a breeze disturbs
the black-and-white scene. A rise in the field blocks her view to the road and
her car, but she would have heard a vehicle approach. The silence is intense,
nature seeming to mourn the young girl’s death. Jo would definitely hear the
crunching of the frost under someone’s boot.

*The fourth and final story, Two Grumpy Old Men Café, was a result of jokes
made amongst friends that we should retire to somewhere warm and have a
breakfast nook where we could hang out with our cronies, keep ourselves busy
and out of trouble perhaps. Maybe do something worthwhile with the profits. The
idea of a couple of retirees doing just that stayed with me until I decided
that it would make an interesting story.

The TGOM café is open from 6 a.m. to
11 a.m. Monday to Friday for breakfast only. If the two Canadians that owned
the place had to stay open any longer they wouldn’t be just grumpy, they’d be
downright inhospitable. At 77 years of age, Wilmot Parker III is an avid
golfer, not a very good one mind you; in fact his fellow hackers call him Trap.
There is always enough sand in the cuffs of his golfing pants at the end of a
game that management accuses him of trying to steal it. If he ever played
eighteen holes under ninety, it was likely his turn to keep score that day.
Nonetheless, he loves the sport and has to be at the clubhouse by 1 p.m. every
day except Sunday, which is church day. He’d been a financial advisor most of
his working life, a golfer for about nine years, a widower for twelve,
restaurateur for three.

Clarence Jerome Parker (no relation),
known as CJ, is 75 and has never been married. When questioned about his
bachelorhood, his defensive phrase is “there are too many lovely ladies, and I
only have one lifetime. It would be unfair to womankind for me to impose myself
upon one partner for the rest of my life.” His afternoons are spent in front of
his computer writing what he calls “smut novels” under the alias of John T.
Boner. The series is a moderate internet hit, available exclusively on his web
page. Other people manage the site now, but every day except Monday (restaurant
accounting day) and Friday (happy hour day), he writes from 1 to 5 p.m. He’d
been a building contractor for thirty-five years, a hobby writer most of his
life, a restaurateur for three. He cooks the biscuits in the mornings.

Estero Boulevard in Fort Myers Beach
is mostly deserted at 5 a.m. The café sits down a side street off the main
road, third business from the corner. It’s tucked neatly between a family-owned
hardware store appropriately named Family’s Hardware and a used book store
called The Author’s Index, run by a retired couple from Burlington, Vermont.
All the buildings are constructed of rust-colored bricks and flat roofs. The
café is the brightest on the street. The brick is whitewashed under large
tinted glass windows that are shadowed by a four-foot awning of wide
black-and-white strips. The dark green letters TGOM dominate the center of the
twenty-six foot canvas held taut by black wrought iron stays that had been
installed by the former occupant, Mel’s Big and Tall, a haberdashery that
suggested they “have you covered up to size 6X.” The inside had been gutted to
expose the overhead metal joists and the raw brick walls when CJ and Wilmot
bought the building four years ago.

SHORTS Vol. 1 is available at amazon.ca as an eBook for
$0.99. It is also available from me in hard copy or directly from creatspace.com.

Vol. 2 will be available in September and will be dedicated to my granddaughter,
Natasha.

Vol. 3 will be available in November and dedicated to my youngest grandchild,
Damien. I hope you enjoy them.

Next week, please join me here at the Scribbler to read an excerpt from my guest author, Donna Glee Williams of North Carolina.

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Somewhere in New Brunswick. Photo by France Duguay.

Allan Hudson

About Me

I started writing later in life, inspired by one of my favorite authors, Bryce Courtenay, who began his writing career in his mid-fifties. It has been one of my most rewarding pastimes. I’ve been an avid reader all my life. It started with Dick & Jane – a primary reader my mother brought home from her work – she was a school teacher and taught me to read at an early age.

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5 Star review for Shattered Figurine

The opening chapter presents the detective, Jo Naylor, with a very important question. One she didn’t really want to answer but knows she must.

The next chapter, one year later, hits you square in the face with full on complicated and violent action as we discover what this story is all about.

Shattered Figurines is a surprisingly unusual detective story in that it doesn’t follow the usual plotline for this genre and the characters aren’t run of the mill either. The author has captured a very real element in both the story and the characters and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

I love a good detective mystery story and Shattered Figurines is one of the best I have read this year. I shall be first in the queue when the author writes another one in this series.

Shattered Figurine - a novella - Available Now!

Shattered Figurine. She sold it at a yard sale four years ago, when she was thirty-seven, and she remembers who bought it. She hadn’t given it a thought since then. In her mind, there had been no reason to. The message this morning changed that. She can’t ignore the possibility, no matter how horrific it seems. She prays silently that she be proven wrong" Click on the photo to read a brief excerpt. Thank you for your support.

Shipping your copy of Shattered Figurine.

Please note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to purchase a copy, you will be able to use your credit card. Once notification is received, please allow up to 24 hours for your copy to be shipped. Thank you.

Review of Wall of War

Dark Side of a Promise

Drake Alexander Adventure - Book 1. I'm pleased to announce the first two novels in the Drake Alexander Adventures are now available as an eBook at the following outlets. Kobo, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Baker & Taylor, Playster, Book2read, Bibliotheca, Overdrive, Tolino, Scribd, 24 Symbols & Amazon. Soon to be available at other booksellers.

Buy it Here

Wall of War and Dark Side of a Promise is available at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Cover to Cover in Riverview, Cocagne Variety in Cocagne and from the author.

The Douglas Kyle Memorial Award for Fiction

My story - The Ship Breakers - received Honorable Mention in the Douglas Kyle Memorial awards for New Brunswick Writers Federation's short story category. Published in 2018 in A Box of Memories, a collection of delightful and entertaining short stories.